One of the reports of Planning Commission of India in 2006 revealed that, the state of undernourishment of the population, one of poverty’s finer manifestations, is much higher than national average in several Indian mountain states, like-Assam, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, and Tripura. Similarly, to give an overview of the problems, a study carried out by the Government of India (Department of Agriculture and Cooperation in 2005) notes that, the mountain states like… Continue

Indrani and Sanjay, the female and male supervisors of a local NGO, accompanied me to Chaukidar cluster in Padharapur a in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh state in India.

Here, we met a 13-year-old girl Janglee and a boy, 7-year-old Kamal . Both are physically and mentally disabled, and could not even stand on their own for long. Janglee and Kama l cannot play with friends and they move around in acute pain in the limited world of their small hut. Kamal ‘s father works…

In the recent Regional Climate Change Adaptation Knowledge Platform (http://bit.ly/9rCs7C ) 21-22 October 2010 in Bangkok, a civil society representative from Bangladesh highlighted that, “the NGOs in Bangladesh are flooded with Climate Adaptation Funds”. This statement is an indication that availability and access to adaptation funds is less of an issue for this country and that the more important issue is the careful monitoring of the use of such fund and…

Many of us celebrated Mountain Day on 11 December 2010. Our congratulations to all of you on this occasion, with the hope that we all could highlight the vital and omni-connectedness of Mountains around the world. We feel that, mountains and its communities will be recognized important as well as vulnerable on various fronts. We have covered the ongoing events around the world on this occasion at:…

For the next couple of weeks, thousands of government officials, NGOs, environmental activists and reporters will gather in Cancun, Mexico for international climate negotiations, officially known as the Sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-16) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) [PDF]. It’s fitting that the talks are being held in a vacation resort, where people go to escape — because only by ignoring what’s happening in the rest of the world is it… Continue